The CIA for the first time has publicly admitted that with British help it engineered the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s then democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq.

The CIA for the first time has publicly admitted that with British help it engineered the notorious 1953 coup against Iran’s then democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadeq.

Sixty years after the overthrow of Mossadeq, a declassified CIA document has acknowledged that the US spy agency was involved in the coup.

The independent National Security Archive research institute, which published the document yesterday, said the declassification is believed to mark the CIA’s first formal acknowledgement of its involvement.

The document, published on the archive’s website under freedom of information laws, describes in detail how the US, with British help, engineered the coup, codenamed TPAJAX by the CIA and Operation Boot by Britain’s MI6.

The documents, declassified in 2011 and given to George Washington University research group under the Freedom of Information Act, come from the CIA’s internal history of Iran from the mid-1970s and paint a detailed picture of how the CIA worked to oust Mossadeq, CNN reported.

“The military coup that overthrew Mossadeq and his National Front cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” the document says.